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It was about this time that our freshly divorced parents decided to sell the house, and our mother decided that it was a good idea to take our few furniture pieces and put them into mini storage, so that we could move into the Travelodge until she could figure out what was next. Mom, Sheila and I lived in the Travelodge for about two days when our fugitive sister Lisa showed up seemingly out of nowhere, and instead of driving a Bentley, she pulled up in the green Datsun with the hammer dent in the hood. Mom wouldn’t allow her inside, so Lisa stood in the parking lot and told us that tomorrow morning, she was taking Sheila and me on a surprise summer road trip. Surprise! We were told to pack light and bring our sleeping bags and that she would be back to get us tomorrow, really, really early in the morning, like real early. All of this was somehow no surprise to our mother, and she stopped just short of saying “don’t let the motel door hit you two in the ass on the way out.” Honestly, I think Mom was looking forward to some alone time with a certain someone in wet long johns. After all, as my father’s skate dancing past can attest to, she had a soft spot for show people.
I’m not sure what qualifies for pre-pre-dawn, but that’s what time Lisa pulled up the next “day.” We stumbled out into the darkness, I got in the back seat of the Datsun, and the girls literally packed around me. It went like suitcase, suitcase, ice chest, Stephen, sleeping bag, pillow, suitcase…I was essentially live cargo back there, whose primary role was to keep the load from shifting.
We drove through the wide deserted suburban streets of Mission Viejo, past the empty tennis courts, the vacant soccer fields and the hushed pools of The Holy Nadadores Swimming Monastery, down to the freeway and then up to Los Angeles, and it still wasn’t quite light out when we met my father on Van Nuys Boulevard at a place called Otto's Pink Pig, which was open, because it had not closed from the night before. We were meeting him on the lounge side of the restaurant, where you could order a cocktail with your omelette. And we sat there eating with our sad father and at one point I remember him taking out a wad of money and pushing it across the table to Lisa, and saying: “Go to John.” My father had a lot of brothers: Sid, Jim, Mike, Dick, the dead twins…but his favorite brother was John. John was also the brother that would show up at your house at midnight, in a rainstorm, and with lightning flashing on one side of his wet face, say something like, “I need to lay low here for a couple of days.” Uncle John lived up in Washington State, way up at the top, in Port Townsend, you know, near the border.
The sun was finally coming up when we said goodbye to our father and pulled out of Otto’s Pink Pig parking lot, heading off on the first leg of our Tour de Surprise. Dad left us with the sage advice that should the car start to make any strange noises, “Just turn the radio up…that’s what it’s there for” he said. My two sisters and I, with a stashed wad of bills in a dented little Datsun first drove west to Santa Monica, then headed north up the coast. To visitors of The Golden State, The Pacific Coast Highway, lovingly, PCH, for short, conjures images of a romantic panoramic strip of two-lane Heaven, all savored at the gentlest, most humane pace you could imagine. And to be fair, large southern stretches of the Coast Highway are as idyllic as a retro postcard would have you believe. But push north, and you become increasingly aware of the prelude to the Vertigo soundtrack pouring out of your dashboard and should you make it as far as Big Sur, the party is now officially over. The spectacular views combined with depraved hairpin turns and an utter lack of human decency practiced by almost every other driver on the road have earned it the well-deserved title of The Ribbon of Death. Being passed on a blind corner can give new meaning to “Breathtaking Vistas!” While taking in the natural wonders, one might ask “Is there a God that made all of this?” A question quickly followed by “…and might we be meeting Him in a moment?” Rocks the size of shopping malls sheering off hundreds of feet of roadway on their way into the Pacific were something to look forward to on a stretch of the highway aptly named Devil’s Slide. And guard rails? Well, guard rails be damned.
Hour after hour, our 18-year-old big sister, outpaced The Angel of Death in our little four speed and needless to say, after a day of staring into our open graves, we were exhausted and only got as far as Carmel. I remember Sheila got sick to her stomach that first night in a little motel and I asked Lisa what was wrong. She said, “It's ok, she's just homesick.” I said, “Homesick? That doesn't make you vomit” but Lisa said Sheila was homesick enough to vomit. The next day, it was raining so hard we only got as far north as San Francisco, and I remember all of us crammed into a fogged-up phone booth. Lisa was looking through the yellow pages and calling to try and see if they had a vacancy at a particular motel and to get directions. I remember feeling scared and I started to cry and I recall Lisa calmly resting the phone receiver down on her shoulder, collecting herself, then punching me in the face, causing me to dramatically slide down the foggy glass and looking back, I think she totally made the right call.
Up, up, up we went, through California, into Oregon, crossing The great Colombia River into Washington and up through, all the way, stopping at the top in Port Townsend. We were met by our warm and loving Aunt Mae and the mercurial and mysterious Uncle John, standing behind her, radiating secrets. I learned that I would be sharing a bed with my expressionless and newly down on his luck, Uncle Mike, who had famously lived in a pre-fabricated Quonset hut for years in Los Angeles. I was also informed that I soon would be joining Uncle John’s construction crew, which nearly paralyzed me with waves of sheer dread.
As if sensing this, Lisa tactically suggested that before we get settled in, we should probably go to Canada. Before we knew it, the three of us were floating over the border on a ferry, arriving in a stormy Victoria, British Columbia. As if this wasn’t surreal enough, we suddenly found ourselves drinking afternoon tea in the Lobby Lounge of the famed Empress Hotel. I remember half expecting Royal Guards to burst in and point at us, screaming: “Seize them! Seize the homeless intruder children!” but somehow, they allowed us to drink our tea and knock a few dainty pastries into Lisa’s purse like Mom would have instructed us to. The staff took further pity on us and allowed a tour of the Empress rose gardens in a horse and carriage. A carriage that would eventually turn into a green Datsun 1200, and then a proper pumpkin the moment we later pulled up to the youth hostel across town where we would be spending the night. I didn’t know what a youth hostel was, but I sure knew what a hippie looked like and there were lots of hippies there, and they welcomed us in and said: “Dinner's in an hour” and they told us that the women's dorm is on that side, and the men's dorm is on that side and so my sisters stood there and said, “It's ok…just go find a bed. Just get a bed, and remember, dinner's in an hour.” And so, I watched my two sisters disappear into their dorm and I took my little red zippered houndstooth patterned luggage and my thin green- clothed bedroll, and I walked around the corner into what looked like a giant gymnasium and it was almost dark—almost completely dark inside—and I had to sort of feel my way along the wall until my eyes adjusted a little, passing menacing man-shadows along the way and I found a bunk bed and I climbed up the outside railing onto the top bunk-with my stuff, and I rolled out my bedroll and leaned against the wall, and my back was up against a giant tin sign that read: NO SMOKING, but out there, in the grey darkness of the giant hangar, I saw little floating amber lights that would come and go...people were clearly smoking…all sorts of things. If they were capable of that, mocking a posted rule that was so big and direct and unambiguous… what else were they capable of?
So, I climbed down from the bunk, and felt along the shadow wall, past the man shadows, until I found the hallway, where I vomited from homesickness…and the hippies came and they said: “Get his sisters! Get his sisters!” and my sisters came and they were mortified and the hippies assured them “That’s okay…we’ll clean it up.” And so, Lisa and Sheila took me and helped me brush my teeth, wrapped me in swaddling and smuggled me into the girls' side, and laid me down on a little cot. They sat on either side of me until I felt safe enough to fall asleep...and after an hour we got up and we went into the dining hall for “dinner.”
The main course was straight off the menu of an Oliver Twist themed restaurant…a bowl of hot water with a cabbage leaf floating in it and a side of rock bread. Lisa said, “I know. I know…but, if you eat this, I promise I'll take us out for Cokes and candy bars” and so we forced down the food of the flower children and true to her word, Lisa said, “Come on,” and we walked out into the dark night, into a steady rain in freaking Canada, and Lisa found a liquor store. We went in, and we got Cokes, and we got candy bars, and put them up on the counter, and the man rang them up, and he looked at us, and he said in a thick French accent, “Three thirty-three. Your total is three thirty-three”
…and for some reason, this seemed to split the night open, and something akin to Grace came pouring down and everything we’d been holding in all this time, we couldn't hold back anymore, and Lisa paid the French man and we took our Cokes and our candy bars, and we ran out into the rain and we laughed and shouted and danced around, like a gang of monkeys. We all somehow got the same lucky number that night, in the same moment, in the same way, and any time, to this day, that we see those three numbers together, we’ll point them out or text or call each other, and it's always a little bit of the same feeling we shared that night. Feeling as if, even though we were far, far away from what we used to call home, something was with us somehow, not against us…all contained in that sequence of 333.
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